Monday, February 27, 2006

I was going to write a blog about my iPod Mini, something along the lines of "what I'm listening too" and then I came across this article.

The idea of a wireless iPod would be a great one, I can imagine a day when all I have to do is go online wirelessly and through a version of iTunes that fits my ipod I can download tunes and podcasts to my hearts content. Right now I have to plug the unit into my laptop, which is also how I charge it up as well.

With the number of retailers now selling iPods; Sears, Wal-Mart and the proliferation of home wireless networks, such as devise is just begging to be created.

Okay, and now for some of the songs I've recently downloaded onto my iPod:

Saturday, February 25, 2006

The End of An Era

When I went to my local Shopper's Drug to purchase a chocolate bar ( aMr. Big if you're keeping score). As I went to the candy section, I passed the magazine rack and there it was, the March issue of Wired Magazine. When I got home I pulled out the chocolate bar, got myself a cup of tea and sat down to read the issue. I noticed there was something wrong with it, it simply did not feel right. So I got up and found a previous issue of the magazine, and I was right, it was smaller. Considerably smaller. What was going on? I began to read, hoping for an explanation to this blasphemy and I found this comment: "The Magazine you are holding is a smudge smaller than previous issues-we took an inch off the side, to be exact. Our new shape conforms to industry standards, which means the magazine fits in more newstand racks and is less likely to get damaged in the mail. It also allows for more efficient production which helps us to keep costs down. Traditionalist, take heart: we are committed, as always, to provocative stories...", and so on and so forth.

Okay, I've been a reader of Wired since Issue 1.04. I've even had a subscription for a few years, until Rogers dropped it from its list of magazine subscriptions and I've seen a lot of changes, from the dropping of the reference of Marshall McLuhan as the mag's patron saint, to the end of putting emails with the names of letter writers. I also saw the ending of the 'Microwave O' the Month' feature, when they would write about what CD they put in the microwave that month, sort of a worst of column. Then again, with the state of music over the last number of years, they probably simply went through too many microwaves. I saw the magazine grow in size and heft during the dot.com bubble to shrink. I even saw the covers change, from the bright colours to todays covers of more pictures. I read excerpts of Microserfs by Douglas Coupland and immediately bought the book. I read about HAL and Mp3's as well as the movie Johnny Mnemonic. Wired was my information. It could be great, as in the article from August 2005, We Are the Web, or it could be mundane, as with the spate of cover stories on the latest Hollywood 'blockbuster'. Still through all this, there was the unique size of each issue. It was fun to hold and read, now they simply made it a regular sized magazine.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Here we go again, the RIAA is trying to take something totally legal, such as copying a CD you own, onto an iPod you own and making it illegal. Understand this, just because the RIAA says its illegal does not make it illegal. It is similar to the time when you would take an LP and copy it to a cassette tape and use it to play on the car stereo. You are simply making a copy for yourself. No where does it say that the copy is going to be used for file sharing or making illegal copies you will sell off an old bedsheet on some street corner.

I wonder if this is a bit of revenge against Steve Jobs for his refusal to allow the music industry to dictate the price of downloads over iTunes.

Ultimately this will be exposed as the sham it is and we will continue to take our CD's and burn them onto our iPods.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

It's the Middle of February

and I haven't posted anything to my blog yet. What happen to the edge and all that stuff. Nothing actually. I've been thinking about doing a blog about some of the things I've been listening to and watching. For example last week I rented the DVD of Doom the unrated, widescreen version. I paid three dollars for the privilege to rent it at the local computer and video store. To sum up the movie, three dollars is about the right price for renting this movie. I don't mean to say it was bad after all it featured The Rock as Sarge a tough as nails Marine Corps officer. How tough? He has Semper Fidelus tatooed on his back. Now that's tough. He is ordered to take a squad of Marines to a base on Mars and do three things, one, rescue all the surviving scientist, two contain whatever the cause of the problem and three, retrieve data. His squad lands on Mars and proceeds to the place of quarentine. They arrive with attitude and really big guns, so you know it's going to be a movie with a rather large body count. If you've played Doom you know the strategy, if it moves shoot it, or blow it up or cut it up with a chainsaw. The movie has the same premise and the attitude is very dark. It even has, near the end the first person feeling of the game, where you see through the eyes of the hero, who is not The Rock at this point and that is my only spoiler. You see the guns, the chainsaws, the plasma weapons and all that good stuff.

What can be said about the movie? It's a movie based upon a video game, what do expect Peter Jackson? It's a time waster. Something to watch while you eat popcorn. The special features are interesting, one is a documentary of the Doom phenomenum and it features Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb from X-Play and Kevin Pereira of "Attack of the Show". They give some interesting insight into the game, plus there is interviews with the people from Id Software.